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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 20 December 2013
[tech] 11 parental IT support issues you can expect if you go home this Christmas … ‘No, change the screen resolution back, please. I prefer all my windows to be blurry and weirdly elongated.’
19 December 2013
[life] How Ayn Rand ruined my childhood … how Objectivism and family life do not mix …
Our objectivist education, however, was not confined to lectures and books. One time, at dinner, I complained that my brother was hogging all the food. 18 December 2013
[mystery] The Internet Mystery That Has The World Baffled … the fascinating story of a complex internet hunt / puzzle that nobody knows who created. ‘…a scavenger hunt that has led thousands of competitors across the web, down telephone lines, out to several physical locations around the globe, and into unchartered areas of the “darknet”. So far, the hunt has required a knowledge of number theory, philosophy and classical music. An interest in both cyberpunk literature and the Victorian occult has also come in handy as has an understanding of Mayan numerology. It has also featured a poem, a tuneless guitar ditty, a femme fatale called “Wind” who may, or may not, exist in real life, and a clue on a lamp post in Hawaii. Only one thing is certain: as it stands, no one is entirely sure what the challenge – known as Cicada 3301 – is all about or who is behind it.’
17 December 2013
[words] OED birthday word generator: which words originated in your birth year? … ‘1970. Your OED birthday word is: laugh-out-loud, adj. Meaning: Likely to cause one to laugh out loud; hilarious.’
16 December 2013
[funny] 55 Sensational TV Screenshots … … ‘Man With Bizarre Name Arrested: Beezow Doo-doo Zopittybop-bop-bop.’
13 December 2013
[weird] An amazing list of actual reasons for admission into the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum from the late 1800s … ‘Venereal Excesses.’
11 December 2013
[comics] Eddie Campbell on From Hell and The From Hell Companion … interviewed by Pádraig Ó Méalóid … ‘From Hell is like a huge big machine with a nice clean orderly front panel. And when you unscrew it and take that off, beneath it you see a complex of wires and cogs and moving parts caked with lubricant. That’s the Companion. After only seeing the front panel for years, this new version of the machine makes the whole thing interesting in ways you never thought of before.’
10 December 2013
[lovecraft] Charlie Stross on what scared H. P. Lovecraft … ‘I believe that Lovecraft’s sense of cosmological dread emerged from the exponential expansion and recomplication of the universe he lived in-it eerily prefigures the appeal of today’s singularitarian fiction, which depends for its dizzying affect on a similar exponential growth curve. Lovecraft interpreted the expansion of his universe as a thing of horror, a changing cosmic scale factor that ground humanity down into insignificance.’
9 December 2013
[mobiles] The Second Operating System Hiding in Every Mobile Phone … all your worst fears about computer/phone security are true … ‘So, we have a complete operating system, running on an ARM processor, without any exploit mitigation (or only very little of it), which automatically trusts every instruction, piece of code, or data it receives from the base station you’re connected to. What could possibly go wrong? ‘
6 December 2013
[politics] Ten political assumptions … a list of assumptions that drive much thinking within the political mainstream … ‘Devaluing professional autonomy and ethics. The counterpart of the elevation of management is – in schools, universities and hospitals – a denigration of traditional professional standards and ethics.’
5 December 2013
[cthulhu] Alexis Madrigal on Big Data and H.P. Lovecraft: ‘…data is merciless. It will correlate all its contents. And then what?’
4 December 2013
3 December 2013
[funny] Man Smoking E-Cigarette Must Be Futuristic Bounty Hunter … ‘Sources told reporters that the man, who inhaled deeply on the mechanized smoking apparatus, causing the tip to glow a bright cobalt hue, probably traveled back in time to track down a deadly fugitive hiding in the early 21st century or something. Reports further indicated that the person, who in all likelihood is a futuristic soldier of fortune with off-world military training, stared off into the distance, scanning the building across the street with what must be enhanced optical implants to locate an elusive outlaw’s bio-signature, then exhaled what appeared to be an odorless vapor.’
2 December 2013
[lego] How to build a Lego Monolith Anomaly … a brief guide to building the Monolith from 2001 … ‘A scaled down Lego Monolith Anomaly (LMA) would be 7 1/2 units high but there are no 1/2 height pieces. Flat Lego pieces are 1/3 height. I find coupling 7 standard 1×4 bricks with 2 flat 1×4 pieces to be the most geometrically sound.’
29 November 2013
7 Ways To Be Insufferable On Facebook … the humblebrag, image-crafting, attention craving – a pretty comprehensive list of annoying approaches to Facebook … ‘A Facebook status is annoying if it primarily serves the author and does nothing positive for anyone reading it.’
26 November 2013
[web] Motherfucking Website … a lovely sweary rant on website design … ‘Cross-browser compatibility? Load this motherfucker in IE6. I fucking dare you.’
25 November 2013
[web] 17 Ancient Abandoned Websites That Still Work … I remember CNN’s O.J. Simpson trial website from 1996. I feel old.
20 November 2013
[movies] 10 remarkable things about Superman IV: The Quest For Peace … looking back at the least sucessful of Christopher Reeves’ Superman movies … ‘The film’s most infamous money-saving location, though, is its use of a Milton Keynes bus station as a stand-in for New York’s United Nations Headquarters on 42nd Street. As Christopher Reeve gloomily put it in his autobiography Still Me, “…we had to shoot at an industrial park in England in the rain with about a hundred extras, not a car in sight, and a dozen pigeons thrown in for atmosphere.” It’s impossible to imagine just how depressing it must have been to set up this particular shot. You’re in Milton Keynes, you have a few dozen extras, and Christopher Reeve walking around in his cape, yet the location still doesn’t look like New York; it looks like a lonely part of a modern British city.’
19 November 2013
[lego] The Lego Pain Scale …
18 November 2013
[german] Toilettenbürstenbenutzungsanweisung … the #1 very long word you’ll only find in a German toilet – it translates as “Toilet brush instructions for use”.
15 November 2013
[lists] Top Nine Things You Need To Know About ‘Listicles’ … a list about Internet lists … ‘A listicle feels more democratic than a hierarchically structured argument, as well as more in tune with a conception of history and the world as just one damn thing after another. The foundational text of Protestantism was a listicle nailed to a church door: Martin Luther’s “95 Theses” posted at Wittenberg. So it makes sense that in our culture, which makes a fetish of anti-authoritarianism, the listicle should have spread everywhere, like mould.’
14 November 2013
[work] Hyperemployment, or the Exhausting Work of the Technology User … Whatever happened to Keynes idea of a Leisure Society? ‘The economic impact of hyperemployment is obviously different from that of underemployment, but some of the same emotional toll imbues both: a sense of inundation, of being trounced by demands whose completion yields only their continuance, and a feeling of resignation that any other scenario is likely or even possible. The only difference between the despair of hyperemployment and that of un- or under-employment is that the latter at least acknowledges itself as an substandard condition, while the former celebrates the hyperemployed’s purported freedom to “share” and “connect,” to do business more easily and effectively by doing jobs once left for others competence and compensation, from the convenience of your car or toilet.’
13 November 2013
[retro-computing] Google BBS Terminal … How Google search would behave if it had been created in the 1980’s.
12 November 2013
[internet] Netflix Has Taken a Huge Bite Out of File Sharing … interesting look at what’s being downloaded on the Internet these days … ‘BitTorrent, the report notes, now accounts for only 7.4 percent of traffic during peak period, while file-sharing in general hovers below 10 percent. And that’s a sharp drop-only five years ago, BitTorrent managed to draw 31 percent of daily streaming traffic and even twice that 10 years ago.’
11 November 2013
[book] At the Shredding Plant … Inside a Book Shredding Factory … ‘Confetti rains down from the shredding machines. Strewn everywhere on the floor is a babel of printed scraps: a non-stop factory of literary recombination and experimentation. Pressed tight into 650-kilo bales and stacked ready for delivery to paper mills, they are huge three-dimensional cut-up poems, only their surfaces of tiny orphaned fragments legible. Here, books are nothing special, just part of a wider ecology of continual destruction, recomposition and miscegenation: books; toilet paper; office waste; files; receipts; and in a second warehouse next-door, the non-paper waste – crates of bicycles; video cassettes; Zimmer frames. The shredder is powerful, omnivorous, indiscriminate.’
8 November 2013
[health] Setting the Record Straight: Debunking ALL the Flu Vaccine Myths … With flu season’s arrival this is a very timely debunking of myths about Flu vaccines … ‘Myth #18: If I get the flu, antibiotics will take care of me. (No, they can’t.) Influenza is a virus. Antibiotics fight bacteria (anti = “against”; biotics = “of life,” referring to living bacteria, not to viruses). All the antibiotics in the world won’t help you fight off a flu infection.’
7 November 2013
[comics] A History of American Comic Books in Six Panels … by Matt Madden …
6 November 2013
[books] 40 Trashy Novels You Must Read Before You Die … fun list from Flavorwire … ‘The Second Lady by Irving Wallace – The premise of this alone sells it: the Russians have, through extensive plastic surgery, created a replica of the First Lady. But once installed, her doppelganger discovers that mimicry is not as easy as it looks.’
5 November 2013
Facebook of the Dead … ‘When, if ever, will Facebook contain more profiles of dead people than of living ones?’
4 November 2013
[batman] What happens when you look up Adam West in the phone book? … ‘West, Adam …. See Wayne, Bruce (Millionaire).’
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